For 40 years, St. Mary Villa has offered quality childcare to diverse families

Pre-school students at St. Mary Villa Child Development Center, Josiah Jackson, left, and Evan Mayer, work on a puzzle together. For 40 years, St. Mary Villa has offered full-time daycare to working families on a sliding scale fee, ensuring a diverse racial and socio-economic mix of families. Photos by Theresa Laurence

It’s no secret to new or expectant working parents that landing a spot at a high-quality daycare can be a stressful journey. If those parents are seeking out a daycare that has long-tenured teachers and serves a racially and socio-economically diverse clientele, it can be an even greater challenge.

St. Mary Villa Child Development Center, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Diocese of Nashville and located in the old St. Vincent de Paul School in North Nashville, has been meeting these needs for the last 40 years.

“Finding a place that checked all the boxes was difficult to come by. Finding a place that had the curriculum, staff and diversity we wanted, we didn’t see that anywhere else” besides St. Mary Villa, said Rachel Speller, mother of 3-year-old Jeffrey Speller, who has attended the daycare since he was an infant.

“Our son is multi-racial and we wanted him to be in an environment as diverse as possible,” Speller said. “Most of the better caliber programs were pretty homogenous,” she said. “This was the perfect intersection of all we were looking for.”

For four decades, St. Mary Villa has offered full-time daycare for working families, but its roots go back much farther than 1978. It could be considered a modern-day re-invention of St. Mary’s Orphanage, which was operated by the diocese for 100 years, until the mid-1960s. After that, the new St. Mary Villa continued to offer residential services for children for about another decade, until it reorganized and shifted to the current daycare structure in 1978.

St. Mary Villa infant room teacher Joyce Mbuthu plays with Elliot Conger, left and Kerwin Scott Jr. St. Mary accepts children ages six weeks to five years old; even though the infant care is the most expensive, it is in the most demand.

Today, two years after a move from White Bridge Road to the St. Vincent campus, St. Mary Villa Child Development Center serves 88 children, from infants to pre-schoolers, with a consistent three-star rating from Tennessee’s Department of Human Services.

Speller, who works near the old St. Mary’s location, said she started researching daycares soon after she learned she was pregnant, and quickly put her name on the waitlist for St. Mary Villa. Since the first day she dropped off her son as an infant, “I’ve never felt nervous that I wasn’t leaving my child in the best of care,” she said.

That high level of care does come at a cost. The tuition for full-time care for infants at St. Mary Villa is $1,125 a month for households with incomes up to $75,000, above average for daycares in Nashville. “It stings a little bit,” Speller said of the infant tuition.

Due to the low teacher/child ratio requirements in the two infant rooms (1:4), St. Mary has to charge that much to keep qualified and well-trained teachers on staff, said St. Mary Villa Executive Director Clarie Givens, who has been with the Child Development Center for 32 years. “We also offer paid benefits which is kind of unheard of now” for childcare workers, she said.

The ability to retain teachers is one of St. Mary Villa’s calling cards, and one standout reason that Katonya Graham wanted her 4-year-old daughter Zeta to attend. “I appreciate that the teachers are older … they have that wisdom, they’ve been around a while,” she said. “They’re really good at what they do.”

Graham also appreciates that the diversity at St. Mary Villa is not limited to the children, but also includes the staff. “We’ve had teachers who are Indian, Hispanic, African-American,” she said. “I want my daughter to know about all different cultures.”

Another key feature that St. Mary Villa offers, for children ages 1 to 5, is a sliding scale fee schedule, which it has utilized throughout its history. For families in the lower income brackets, the monthly cost drops significantly as the child ages and the teacher/child ratios in the classroom change.

Because of the sliding scale, “we have a really good mix” of families, racially and socio-economically, Givens said. “Most people pick us for that reason.”

In addition to the sliding scale, St. Mary Villa also accepts vouchers from the Department of Human Services’ Child Care Certificate program, which requires parents to be employed or in school full time. This helps make tuition more affordable for the lower-income families, Givens said.

The upper-income families, she added, “willingly pay” the market rate for tuition. “We don’t have many who walk away from an infant care spot.”

St. Mary Villa also receives support from United Way, which offers literacy support, and helps maintain a lending library at the daycare.

“Some children learn to read before they leave here,” Givens said. “All of them are very well prepared when they get to kindergarten.”

Because of the level of care that St. Mary Villa provides for children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old, many families keep their children there until they are ready to go to kindergarten.

Graham wishes she could keep her daughter there even longer. “I wish they had a kindergarten or an after-school program,” she said. “I want to keep her there as long as possible.”

Right now, “we’re getting lots of calls now for summer 2019,” Givens said. It’s not uncommon for families to get on a waitlist a year in advance, she said.

St. Mary Villa currently has spaces available in the 4-5 year-old preschool room; other rooms have very limited availability.